Electric cooking pots for preparing and serving hot foods are well known in the prior art. Such cooking pots typically include a deep well member and a heating element arranged in functional relation thereto for supplying heat. Such cooking pots may be provided with compartmented trays, which are disposed within the interior space of the cooker for reheating and maintaining food in a ready-to-eat condition.
However, such compartmented trays are not convenient for the storage of leftover food items due to size constraints within a typical refrigerator. Further, such serving trays typically are not easily handled when hot, are not stackable (i,e. one within another) to save space, and are not conveniently packaged at the time of manufacture due to the lack of available space within the interior cavity of the roasting oven. As a result the food trays must be packaged and shipped separately, which increases overall manufacturing costs.
Thus, the present invention has been developed to resolve this problem and other shortcomings of the prior art.